This study investigated American English (AE) speakers' perceptual
assimilation of North German (NG) vowels spoken in 5 CVC contexts by four adult
male speakers. Fourteen NG vowels were produced in /bVp, bVt, dVt, gVt, gVk/
syllables in the sentence ``Ich habe CVC gesacht.'' Twelve monolingual AE
listeners were tested on each speaker's corpus; consonantal context was a
within-subjects variable. Response categories were indicated by /hVd/ key words
and IPA symbols. Listeners responded by selecting the AE category containing the
vowel most similar to the one in the utterance and rating its ``goodness of
fit.'' The percentages of selection of the modal AE response category for each
NG vowel ranged from 99% for /i/->/i/ (best fit) to 41% for /(slashed oh)/->/u/
(worst fit). NG front and back rounded vowels were assimilated to AE back
rounded vowels. However, for seven vowels, modal category percentages differed
by greater than 15% across the five consonantal contexts. There was also
significant variation in assimilation patterns across the four speaker groups
for 11 of the NG vowels. These results have implications for theories of L2
speech learning. [Work supported by NIDCD.]